The unofficial social hub

Register old-timers pleaded with me to mention the unofficial social annex situated next door to 715 Locust St. for 40 years.

“Don’t forget the Office Lounge,” Matt Campbell implored.

The downtown bar opened in 1951 just across the alley from the Register where the Marriott Hotel now stands. Dorothy Gabriel took over ownership in 1968 from her husband, Rocky, after their divorce. Four of the couple’s eight children also worked there.

“Down the alley and take the first right” were the basic directions from the newsroom, recalled Walt Shotwell.

The bar was so nearby that Register employees, Raffensperger said, “never even got wet going in there” in the middle of a rainstorm.

In the primitive era before cellphones, a call to the Office Lounge was an editor’s sure bet to scrounge up extra staffers for a breaking news story.

When the bar eventually shuttered in 1991 (after having relocated into the bottom of a parking garage across Grand Avenue), reporter Larry Fruhling lauded the Office Lounge as “birthplace of a thousand story ideas and a hundred office romances — few of which anyone remembered the next morning, especially the story ideas.”